Just as well you aren’t depending on this blog to keep you up-to-date, as there has been a bit of a break here as I nursed my remaining data allowance. And in that time we’ve had so many things happen, most recently the charging of Cardinal George Pell for alleged historic sex offences against children. He will be fronting court in Melbourne next month. I can’t help wondering what an old internet friend, Father Ken Sinclair, who died in 2005, would have had to say. Back in 2001-2 he was foreshadowing some of this stuff in conversations we had on ICQ. See my post Back to very early days–and the strange immortality of the internet.

Then today we have had Donald Trump showing what a small-minded vindictive arsehole he really is. no great surprise surely. Presidential? Pull the other one… And we’re supposed to trust the judgement of this person on the most important issues in the world? God help us all!

And here in Oz Tony Abbott is in full feral mode. Rather liked former leader of his party John Hewson on this today.

…say what he likes, Abbott is still quite bitter and twisted about Turnbull seizing his job, and getting worse with time. His IPA speech this week was a clear example of “disloyalty”. Sure, he dressed it up as a speech of “principle” and “conviction” and true conservative “ideology”, but it was blatantly a direct attack on Turnbull, and his more “centrist” strategy, designed to undermine, and constrain Turnbull.

And a major part of the data from the 2016 Australian Census was released this week. That part concerning religion interested quite a few of us. Here are a couple of graphics from the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail and the Sydney Daily Telegraph made much of a “surge in the number of Muslims”. As you might expect these days. Headline:

Muslim population in Australia soars to 600,000 as religion becomes the nation’s second-biggest – a 77% jump in the past DECADE, according to Census

Soaredto 2.6% of the population, of whom “radicals” must constitute… Well, you guess…

The really interesting figure was the rise of “No Religion” — whatever that might actually mean.

But now for the really important stats: in June the most viewed posts on this blog have been:

I love maps. Always have. You’ll notice that I now have a map as my masthead, and yes my place is in there somewhere, so there you see my little everyday world. Last April I referred to a marvellous blog called Strange Maps, which is often one of the top blogs here on WordPress.

Here are smaller versions of a couple of recent ones. You must visit Strange Maps to see them bigger, read about them, and start exploring the other maps.

First, 130 – A Ten-State Australia, which should interest Jim Belshaw and horrify John Howard, I suspect.

When I first posted on Facebook that I would be doing the poetry and music sequence I said: “I have resolved that when I resume my blog around Easter I will ignore for the moment whatever Trump/Putin might be up to, even if it is World War 3. Expect poetry and music for a week.”

Well. World War 3 hasn’t quite started yet, but not for lack of trying over the past week. Aside from Trump and Putin — the latter not getting much airtime lately — we have had this extremely weird guy:

Kim’s real birth date is a mystery. While his official birth year in 1982, the U.S. Treasury Department — after imposing sanctions on North Korea last July — officially identified his date of birth as Jan. 8, 1984.

Kim is the world’s youngest leader, if we go by the birth date listed by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Reports suggest that Kim attended a boarding school in Switzerland between 1998 and 2000. He is reported to have been enrolled in the school under the name “Pak Un.”

Beijing: As tensions mounted on the Korean Peninsula, Admiral Harry Harris made a dramatic announcement: An aircraft carrier had been ordered to sail north from Singapore on April 8 toward the Western Pacific.

In reality, it was on its way to join Australian forces in the Indian Ocean….

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